Linux Beach

This blog is dedicated to the struggles of people everywhere to advance human progress and save this planet from the decline of capitalism. Its focus, since 2011 has been supporting the emerging revolutions everywhere.

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Friday, February 2, 2018

Finally, The MEMO that the White House, Fox News, and Russian bots have been shouting about for a week, has been released and it turns out to be a big Nothing Burger.

Although the long hyped and just released Trump-Nunes Memo is only 4 pages long, they make it very easy to focus in on its most important point because it is the only phrase rendered in bold type. It reads:

For example, in September 2016, Steele admitted to Ohr his feelings against then-candidate Trump when Steele said he "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president."

Steele was hired by Fusion GPS in investigate Trump's Russian connections in June 2016. September 2016 was after Christopher Steele had conducted his investigation. That in no way shows that Steele entered his investigation of Donald Trump with a bias, although he might well have in as much as he didn't need to be a seasoned British spy to be aware of Trump's long history of racism and misogyny. It only shows that he "was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president," after he had spent months investigating Trump, his sexual perversions, and his ties to the Putin gang in Russia. What would you expect? BREAKING NEWS would have been if Steele still thought Donald Trump would make a suitable president while knowing even just the parts of his dossier that have been verified.

I'll bet Elliot Ness was passionate about sending Al Capone to prison after learning of his many, then unproven, crimes, but you didn't hear any Republicans screaming that he should be denied warrants and pulled off the case.

Another item:

The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named U.S. person, but does not name Fusion GPS and principal Glenn Simpson, who was paid by a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie) representing the DNS...

As if the Judge couldn't have asked for more details on the "named U.S. person" if he thought it relevant to the warrant application. Maybe he considered Steele a trusted source. Judges regularly hear from private investigators who are paid by someone with a vested interest in the case, that isn't exactly breaking news either. What is important are the facts presented, and nothing in this Trump-Nunes Memo impeaches those facts, the backlash may be that this Memo does help to impeach the president.

Thursday, February 1, 2018

The development of Artificial Intelligence Technology under capitalism means that competition among workers worldwide for a dwindling supply of jobs will be fierce. Self driving cars are expected to replace 7 million professional driving jobs in the next decade in the United States alone. Uber knows what's up. They are building an infrastructure and market position on the backs of its current drivers. Within the decade, they will be handing them pink slips and sending self-driving cars to take you to the airport. And this is but one example. We can already see the jobs lost to automation at the checkout lines of our local stores. What is harder to see is the automation taking place in the huge Amazonian warehouses that are replacing the local stores and their entire workforce, and while they now employ a host of delivery people, they, quite rightly, envision a future of delivery drones and bots.

All this would be fine and good under socialism, where the work reduction would be shared among all workers. Under socialism, it could mean the standard work week could be reduced from 40 to 20 and eventually even 10 hours a week, with wages raised such that those hours support a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. But we are still under capitalism where every technological advance is twisted to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor.

Trump's tax plan already lays much of the economic groundwork for this AI transition. In the past, the capitalist tended to put their plants where the cheap labor was, and they industrialized the world in the process. In the coming era, that is less of a consideration. Daimler, the maker of Mercedes Benz, is spending over a billion dollars to build a new car factory in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and it will only create 600 new jobs. Whenever did an auto plant employ less than a thousand workers? Ford's great River Rouge plant employed a hundred thousand workers at its peak. Today, its Kansas City plant employs 7,320, and its Louisville plant employs 4,610. Plants like this Daimler one are extremely capital intensive, the owners want to place these new ones where they will be safe. Trump's tax plan is designed to give them the capital to do that. His military expansion and increased police powers are designed to protect their investment.

The capitalists and their politician are no dummies. They know workers are not likely to take this lying down. They can expect much civil unrest, even revolution. The lessons of the Arab Spring and Occupy are not lost on them. What to do? One answer: Boil them like frogs. Bring on the changes slowly. Another: Bring back racism, big time.

White supremacy, even the very concept of a "white race" or "white people"was an invention of emerging American capitalism in the 17th century. Unwilling or unable to attract enough European workers to the new world, they took to kidnapping laborers from Africa. When the African and European bonded laborers made common cause and revolted together, as they did in Jamestown in 1676, the bourgeoise decided on a strategy of "white privilege," the "privilege" of not being reduced to lifetime bondage, as the Africans were. [They did try that first. Read the history.] Since then, it has always been one of the main tools they have used to divide and conquer the working class.

In the post-World War II civil rights era, the US bourgeoisie, or atleast the leading portion of it, saw that the domestic struggle against racism could jeopardize their power, so they allowed, even led, certain changes in the direction of social justice [while they externalized racial aggression to Korea, Vietnam and Central America.] They even forced these changes on the most backwards of white workers, and so they remained in the driver's seat of these changes. To a certain extent, they retained the ability to roll them back. If the term "neoliberalism" has any meaning, it is this. So in the face of this coming conflict with labor, it should surprise no one that they are bringing back white supremacy bigtime, and the Trump cabal is their instrument for doing this. This is what the white Left refused to see, and even aided, with its infamous "don't vote for the lesser of two evils" campaign.

While these neo-racists are initially focussing on illegal immigrants because they can call them criminals by definition, and then legal immigrants or would be immigrants, because they aren't Americans, it is easy to see that sooner or later they will be targeting all people of color, especially the 39 million African-Americans, for expulsion or extermination. To prepare the way, they are getting the public use to a government that routinely, and by its own laws, treats people of color with heartless cruelty.

On Tuesday President Donald Trump gave his first State of the Union address, and while it contained a number of racist slights against African Americans and other people of color, a real focus was to brand all illegal immigrants from Central and South America as criminals by retelling vivid tales of MS-13, the El Salvadorian criminal gang that first developed in Los Angeles, and then was spread to El Salvador and from there to the rest of the world, because the US chose to deal with what was essentially a domestic problem, home grown criminals, by making use of a legal technicality to send those criminals to El Salvador. [Remember when they accused Fidel Castro of "dumping" Cuba's criminals on the US after they invited any Cuban that could catch a boat to come here legally? Immigration policy can change fast if it's thought a socialist economy can be hurt in the bargain. Remember the outrage that Castro would send his criminals here when they should have been locked up in Cuban jails! Remember the uncontrolled violence that brought even to an advanced country like the US? Remember Scarface?] Nevertheless, with no sense of history, and in a speech that was suppose to set the agenda for the whole country for the next year, Trump found a way to call out"the savage gang MS-13" by name no less than four times. He did this to stoke racism as a capitalist buffer in the coming crisis.

One of the things that makes racism work so well is that the racist power structure always works overtime to create in the oppressed population precisely those characteristics it claims most strongly to object to. Joel Kovel wrote about how this dynamic played out in the oppression of African Americans, which in turn became the prototype for all racial oppression, in White Racism: A Psychohistory:

Just as the dominative Southerner needed to keep "his" black body powerless, so does the aversive Northerner need a powerless object with which to play out the symbolic game. And not only must this object be powerless; it must be suitable to represent what has to be projected upon it. Thus for the black to fit into the aversive equations, he must be made into the affirmation of the excremental body. He must become the double negative of anality. the fantasy of a fantasy — not cold, pure, clean, efficient, industrious, frugal, rational (that is, not the pantheon of anal- negative ego traits which are the summum bonum of the bourgeois order) but rather warm, dirty, sloppy, feckless, lazy, improvident and irrational, all those traits that are associated with blackness, odor, and sensuality to make their bearer worthy of aversion. And so, throughout our history, whites have created the institutions by which black people are forced to live, and which force them to live in a certain way, almost invariably so as to foster just that constellation of unworthy traits. From slavery itself to modem welfare systems, this has been the enduring pattern, reinforced in popular culture and education by a panoply of stereotypes along the same lines. p. 195

Anal-negative is exactly right. Remember El Salvador is the one less than black country that Trump considers a "shithole," and here again he gives us an almost classic example of how the white supremist sets things up in the oppression community in such a way as to create the very problem he is complaining about. In this case, after tarring the whole immigrant community, as criminal, he has orders issued to strengthen the hand of criminals among the overwhelming law bidding illegal immigrant population. So it should surprise no one that the day after bashing MS-13 in his SOTU address, he had his immigration department give them this gift. From Newsweek:

by Graham Lanktree
1 February 2018
Immigration agents are being told it is official U.S. government policy to capture and detain undocumented immigrants in federal, state, and local courthouses.

The new guidelines were reportedly formalized Wednesday. The policy, however, runs counter to concerns raised by civil rights groups, California’s Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, and so-called sanctuary cities where local authorities do not, as a rule, turn over illegal immigrants to federal officials. More...

This is a real boon to gangs like MS-13 that operate largely among the undocumented in immigrant communities. In the past, if a witness needed intimidating, they had to do it themselves. With this change in policy, they are being helped bigtime by ICE. It assures there will be fewer witnesses willing to come forward from among that immigrate community to testify against the gang members, and fewer criminal complaints as well, knowing that a, now dangerous, visit to the courthouse will be necessary for their prosecution. So this measure can be expect to strengthen the influence of criminals in the immigrant communities, the very thing Trump was complaining about. And while it is possible that more MS-13 gang members will be deported as a result of this policy, through their networks, they are likely to find their way back much quicker than the illegal immigrants that were deported for coming to court to oppose them. [Imagine that: an American justice system in which the criminal and the witness/victim receive the same punishment - deportation!] Besides, history has already shown that deporting gang members, rather than imprisoning them, and rehabilitating them where they are, only leads to the further expansion of gang activity. For the racists, that is the desired effect. For Trump the enemy is not MS-13, the enemy is all people of color, and MS-13 is his ally.

Friday, January 26, 2018

Introducing an important new documentary from Linux Beach on the ballistic missile alert that led over a million people in Hawaii to believe that had only minutes to live for 38 minutes on the morning of Saturday, January 13, 2018. That was the time between when the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency sent this warning to a million cell phones in Hawaii and the time they retracted it over the same emergency messaging system.

This documentary takes an in depth look at the false ballistic missile alert that terrorize Hawaii on the morning of Saturday, January 13, 2018. It combines real time news network footage from the day of the event, together with documentary footage from the Korean War, and archival footage from many other source to question the official explanation(s) of this terror event and the 38 minute delay in sending out the retraction. Evidence presented indicates that this was a planned exercise, a provocation for thermonuclear war, and a provocative case of a government terrorizing its own people.

How it came to be made

A number of luck coincidences came together to make the production of this very important film possible. Because I am protected by CA labor laws while my mostly TX coworkers aren't, my vacation hours roll-over from year to year whereas their's don't. So, as usual, I didn't join the scramble to burn vacation hours in December. Instead, I scheduled the third week off week in January for a bit of time off to read and relax. I didn't know that I was going to be hit with a bad case of timeline fever at the time.

The Friday evening before my vacation, I was browsing YouTube, and I noticed a channel streaming CNN in real time, Saturday morning, I woke up with a question: Could the software I use to download videos from YouTube also be used to capture this livestream? It took updating to the latest version and learning some new options, but by about 9AM PST I had CNN streaming live to my hard disk. I also found similar realtime streams for Fox News and Al Jazeera and got them going as well. This is how I came to be recording these channels as the false ballistic missile alert scare hit Hawaii.

Some of the most informative news about an event like this comes from the first reports from people in the area and the early explanations, for example, initially the Governor's office and the Trump White House gave very different explanations, caught on tape! Once I saw what I had captured, I knew what I had to do. I spent my vacation week huddled over my computers. I combined this event news footage with other found footage, including of American war crimes footage from Korea, to product a film that shows that the false Hawaii ballistic alert was a preplanned exercise designed to drive a war fever against North Korea. It was also designed to test local government and media compliance with federal policy, and raise the profile of the military in American life. It was designed to move us closer to thermonuclear war and was a flagrate example of a government terrorizing its own people.

Although I shot this out of the cannon in a week, I think it is my most important film ever, even compared to Vietnam: American Holocaust, because while that documentary was about remembering a holocaust, this is an urgent call to prevent one, a thermonuclear holocaust.

Please watch, download, and share widely.

In June of 2013 I wrote a guide to downloading YouTube videos with a program that is available for both Windows, Mac and Linux OS, Trust but Verify: How to Download YouTube Videos. The newest version even allows you to download livestreams, which is how I was able to capture much of the footage for this film.

In this era were freedom of information is being threatened as never before and important political and historical documentation is being removed daily from YouTube for a multitude of reasons, and especially because I have every reason to fear this film will be so threatened, I thought it would be a good time to dust off that blog, update it and make note of it again. The future existence of this and so many other important videos should not depend of the priorities of corporations, even Google. Please use youtube-dl to download this film and also to make a personal record of other YouTube videos that are important to you. Important records of people's struggles and suffering in Syria and Libya are possibly in the greatest danger. You might notice that many of the YouTube videos from those countries that have been featured in Linux Beach are no longer available, so get them while you can.

Friday, January 12, 2018

"We've gotten to a place where nobody can be honest about anything." -Tucker Carlson @ 03:19

Tucker Carlson began his Thursday evening Fox News show with a full-throated defense of President Donald Trump and his labeling of Haiti, El Salvador and unspecified African countries "shitholes."

He had Jose Parra, the "Latino communications director for Barack Obama's 2012 campaign," on as a guest. Carlson couldn't understand why anybody thought Trump's comment was racist. As usual, he acted as if it was just beyond the understanding of an intelligent white guy like himself and he called upon Parra to explain. He also called upon Parra to defend Haiti.

Carlson: President Trump said something that almost every single person in America actually agrees with. An awful lot of immigrants come to this country from other places that aren't very nice. Those places are dangerous. They're dirty. They're corrupt. They're poor, and that's the main reason those immigrants are trying to come here, and you would too if you lived there. President Trump asked why America doesn't receive more immigrants from places you might want to visit on vacation. Why aren't we getting more people from Norway, he said, which by almost any measure including the UN's measures is the most developed and richest country in the world. While saying this Trump used an expletive, and that's not surprising either since he uses them all the time and was speaking privately and yet for some reason virtually everyone in Washington, New York, and LA considered this a major major event. @00:11

Carlson's generalizations of various third world countries as dangerous, dirty, and corrupt is, of course, a racist stereotype that tells us more about the workings of his own mind than it does about Haiti, El Salvador or Africa. All around the world, you will find big cities that are "dirty" or have "dirty" parts depending on how you define "dirt" [see yesterday's blog], and dangerous and corrupt, make me think of Putin's Russia first, although there are a host of contenders. And while Norway may be a great place to vacation, it might not be for everyone. Business Insiderranked it the third most expensive place in Europe to vacation, at $183.76 per night, more expensive than Rome ($153.84), London ($151.40), or Paris ($145.89). Carlson probably also isn't a fan of Norway's 27% corporate income tax rate.

Carlson is sidetracking the discussion to avoid the main issue, which is that Trump didn't just swear, he used a word that raises very potent primeval images because it speaks darkly to the unconscious mind of the racist. The main tactic he uses to sidetrack the discussion is to set up a straw comparison so he can complain about "dishonesty," as through he honestly can't see why people say Donald Trump is a racist:

Carlson: I think we're kind of having that debate but what bothers me about the explosion this afternoon is the dishonesty in it, and I'll just give you one example: Joan Walsh over at MSNBC, an analyst over there, was asked just a minute ago would you rather live in Haiti or Norway, and she said with a straight face "I can't say." Now that's lying! If we've gotten to a point where we all have to pretend that every country is exactly as nice as every other country then we're being dishonest.

Even a billionaire like Haiti's Gregory Brandt above can't do this on most days in Norway.

While Carlson is clearly striving to equate Norway with "good" and Haiti with "bad," the question of which place an individual might prefer to live in is not as clear cut as Tucker would like us to believe. It really is a question of personal preference, and Carlson is forgetting at least two important facts: 1) The rich live well everywhere, and 2) Norway is cold no matter how rich you are. Also 8 hours of sunlight is the longest day, 18°C (64°F) is about the hottest, and cold is a whole nother story, so it certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea.

Carlson: We know he said these countries are crummy places, okay? They're holes or whatever profanity, but the people who left those countries, some of them rode trains all way through Mexico or hid in a wheel well of a plane to leave, they would agree with that. So why the outrage? Is it you have to lie, and pretend as Joan Walsh does "I don't know if I'd live in Norway or Haiti." Like we've gotten to a place where nobody can be honest about anything.

Carlson: I mean one is the richest country in the world [ed note: Qatar ($124,930) > Norway ($70,590) per capita] , the other is one of the poorest countries in the world. You think it's immoral to point that out? It's a statement of values? I'm asking you a very simple question: If Haiti isn't such a bad place why don't we say to the people who are here temporarily in refuge from Haiti go back? It's great! We don't say that because it's not great actually. It's everything the president said. It was not an attack on Haitians. It's an acknowledgement that their country is not as nice as other countries, and if you can't even say that out loud without being called a racist by people like you, and the morons over on MSNBC...I'm saying anybody who says that's a racist statement should explain how it is.

The whole point of the segment was to defend Trump's "shithole countries" statement by claiming that it wasn't a racist slur. The denigration of Haiti and Joan Walsh was just fill, and Tucker Carlson managed to talk his way through the segment without mentioning "shit" by that or one of its many other names. He acted as though he was ignorant of what it was about Trump's comment that made it so incendiary, and thoroughly racist to the core. I would point him to yesterday's blog, How Trump's "shithole" comment reveals the psychology of his racism for an education, but he has already made it clear in at least one past show that he clearly understands even his own infantile obsession with feces and how it is intertwined with the mythology of racism.

Tucker Carlson used the feces fantasy to condemn Roma people, which he called "gypsies" moving to Pennsylvania. Anna Merlanwrote about it in Jezebel, 18 July 2017:

[O]n Monday, he invited a Roma filmmaker named George Eli on his program and demanded to know why his people can’t use toilets:

Eli gently suggested that both the townspeople and the new arrivals “are suffering from a little bit of culture shock.” But Carlson had poop on his mind, and could not be swayed.

“I have heard a lot of people mention, I hate to say it, public defecation,” Carlson told Eli. “There are a lot of news stories about this going back a long time in the UK and here.” He mentioned pooping on “playgrounds and sidewalks and front steps... That seems to me to be a hostile act.”

Eli chuckled but kept it together, telling Tucker that while he didn’t know exactly what was going on in Pennsylvania, “I’ve been Roma all my life and my family’s been Roma all my life and we use bathrooms... I can’t respond to something I’ve never seen as a Roma person.”

Tucker could not be swayed. He wanted to talk about the poop. “What’s that about?” he inquired. “It’s not something you need to do. So you have to assume it’s a statement.”

Eli did his best here, pointing out that some Roma people are from rural areas without great sanitation, while also clearly thinking to himself, “Why does this guy want to talk about poop so bad?”

Tucker Carlson wanted to associate the Roma people with poop for the same reason Donald Trump has taken to calling poor countries populated by people of color "shithole countries." This infantile association is one of the strongest fortifications white supremacy has built into western culture and in times when white hegemony is being threatened, they feel the need to rev it up.

As we come to grips with the fact that an overt racist controls the greatest nuclear arsenal on the planet, and is leading the United States into nuclear confrontations with an Asian nation, it would be useful to take a deeper look at the psychology of the racist.

Donald Trump's recent remarks that called Haiti, El Salvador and African states "shithole countries," as compared to Norway, gets more to the root of how his childlike mind really thinks about race than just about anything he has ever said. As an aside, I would say that is just one more sign of his quickly deteriorating mental condition. But more to my main point Joel Kovel'sWhite Racism - A Psychohistory, Columbia University Press, 1984, goes into great detail in its 301 pages about how infantile fantasies of feces underline the psychology of aversive racists like President Donald Trump. We know he is an aversive racist because he hates to be around black people. He would even have black employees removed from the floor before visiting his casinos. Here are a few brief excerpts that speak to the aversive racist's obsession with "shit":

We observe here some of the basic aspects of aversive racism. There is the sense of conflict, both against better knowledge and against moral judgment: "It won't rub off." . . . 'I shouldn't be that way." And there is the sense of something so urgent and immediate and existentially valid that it overrides these scruples and forces the white person away. This something is the fantasy of dirt.

Recall that dirt is at symbolic root anything that can pass out of the body, and that hence should not pass back into the body, nor even touch it. Thus the common theme of the three quotes: contact with black hands contaminates food and makes it unfit to enter the body; contact with a black body will result in the blackness rubbing off on one's own precious body and thereby befouling it.
...
The nuclear experience of the aversive racist is a sense of disgust about the body of the black person based upon a very primitive fantasy: that it contains an essence-dirt-that smells and may rub off onto the body of the racist. Hence the need for distance and the prohibition against touching.
...
Although the fantasy of dirt, and its projection onto the black man, attained its full force at a late stage in our history, it was present from the beginning as an element of the white man's reaction to the black. As Jordan comments when he introduces the theme of anal fantasies in his study of early American racial attitudes: "One sort of stress arose from emotional turmoil within individuals, and here it is possible to gain an occasional glimpse into the deepest, least rational meaning [italics his] of human blackness for white men . . . the Negro's appearance, his blackness, seems to have served certain deep-seated unconscious needs of at least some white men. There are sufficient indications of this fact in colonial America to make ignoring it difficult. Sexual intermixture was frequently referred to as 'staining' the white population. . . .""

Gross elements of these aversive fantasies still persist in our culture and wherever racism is found. The idea of "staining" the blood lives on in the "mongelization" fantasies cherished by all racists, and especially in America where, as Jordan points out, the belief emerged that the Negro's blood shared in the general filthiness illustrated by his skin, and that this same "blood" would be directly transmitted through the generations should intermarriage occur. Then there is the coarse racist epithet "boogie," a word applied both to the black human being and to specimens of mucus that, because they come from the body, automatically become a symbol of dirt. The list of dirt fantasies which whites apply to the Nego could be extended indefinitely.

Just as the basic dirt fantasy emerges early in human development, so does its application to black people. This point has been subjected to empirical proof in an outstanding example of social anthropological work by Mary Ellen Goodman. As reported in her book, "a sample of 104 small children, both Negro and Caucasian, revealed the uniform fantasy that a ), Negroes differed from whites in being dirty and that b), this implied a sense of basic inferiority. These beliefs set in during the pre-school years and had become quite well developed by the age of four."

The author writes perceptively of how the sense of inferiority so engendered enters into the minds of the black children to produce the nuclei of a lifelong low self-image; and of how the reverse conviction settles into the personalities of the whites. In this study, we can sense the depth of the irrationality inherent in the problems of race. As Goodman comments, "the fact is that mere intellectual awareness of the physical signs of race is not all of the story. There is another part which is not merely startling but quite shocking to liberal-humanitarian sensibilities. It is shocking to find that four-year-olds, particularly white ones, show unmistakable signs of the onset of racial bigotry."

We have been talking of dirt, which represents a set of peculiar fantasies based upon bodily experience. The central aspect of bodily experience upon which this tissue of daydreams rests is, of course, the act of defecation, and the central symbol of dirt throughout the world is feces, known by that profane word with which the emotion of disgust is expresses: shit. Furthermore, when contrasted with the light color of the body of the Caucasian person, the dark color of feces reinforces, from the infancy of the individual in the culture of the West, the connotation of blackness with badness. And since this dark brown color is derived from blood pigments, since in fact blood is the only internal bodily substance which is dark, the absurd beliefs about "staining" the blood through intermarriage with "inferior" races gain an ironic verification-one which, however, the proponents of these beliefs would be loath to accept.

Thus the root symbol between the idea of dirt and the blackness of certain people is that highly colored, strongly odored, dispensable and despised substance which the human body produces so regularly. How strange that this substance-which, after all, knows the body on the most intimate terms, and which is, aside from the pathogenic bacteria occasionally associated with it (another piece of reality immaterial to the life of fantasy ), certainly innocuous enough-should have received the brunt of such contempt and rage! Almost as peculiar is-the general reluctance to come to realistic grips with those distortions of the world which so clearly derive in part from their symbolic association with feces.

We can see from this presentation that Donald Trump's use of the word "shit" in reference to countries of color was no accident. He didn't just use a bad word, he used a word that reveals the inter infantile associations that drive the current president of the United States whenever the thinks about people that don't look like him.

The association with blood also glimpses why questioning Barack Obama's right to the presidency on account of birth was such a good proxy for questioning this right to the presidency on account of race for Donald Trump and his followers. Here is another short excerpt from Kovel's book:

By and large, connections between feces and the various symbolic organizations with which it is associated remain deeply repressed. The substance itself is abhorred, although the word, shit, is used freely enough; but for the rest the connection is mediated through the more remote, and hence less threatening, symbols of dirt. However, as we have observed in the case of castrative wishes, the deeper meaning becomes more explicit when the social structure within which these fantasies are realized becomes strained. Just as when a Negro became "uppity," he could expect a kind of brutal reprisal that might culminate in a castrative lynching, so when blacks today "move too fast" for the taste of whites one may expect certain raw manifestations of anal fantasies.

Whether he realizes it or not, this is where Donald Trump was coming from when he said:

"Why do we want all these people from 'shithole countries' coming here?"

These brief excerpts hardly do Kovel's work justice so I hope you will read the book. I also hope these short selections will show that Donald Trump's "shithole countries" comment came from a very dark and very warped place in his infantile brain.